


one for sorrow

by Emlee_J



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Feelings Realization, Fluff, Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25207360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emlee_J/pseuds/Emlee_J
Summary: one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold and seven for a secret, never to be told.The rhyme has followed Tobio and his iridescent blue and white plumage for most of his life.‘Oh, isn’t it apt,’they would say:‘for the king of the court to have a magpie’s wings.’For magpies are geniuses and the lonesome bring naught but sorrow.But then there’s another boy; sunshine incarnate – with wings as black as night, who adds more lines to the song.eight for a hug, nine for a kiss, and ten for a bird you must not miss.-In which the magpie falls in love with the crow.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Kageyama Tobio
Comments: 86
Kudos: 477





	one for sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a moment of catharsis. I've been feeling the pressure a lot recently to write a certain way, to portray the characters a certain way. Very 'don't do this, don't do that' or it's awful. And I kind of came to the conclusion... fuck it. it's fanfiction, i'll indulge myself. and i'm aware that some of the birds featured here aren't found in japan but also people don't have wings, so. INDULGENCE.

_one for sorrow_

Kazuyo tilts his head as he watches his grandson in the garden, bouncing his volleyball against the side of the house, and considers.

Not his form, or how he’d had a game today and yet was still playing now, hours later, but the fluffy, dull wings folded neatly against his back.

For Tobio was soon to turn ten, when his fluffy, juvenile feathers would finally shed and the adult ones spring forth. A celebrated day, where dull baby feathers litter the floor for hours as the true, vibrant plumage grows in. For many, it’s also when the species of the wings on the child’s back is made known – and Kazuyo is quietly curious.

Tobio’s wings are sooty-black and grey, and not very interesting at all, on most counts. Kazuyo thinks he will probably grow in the same wings as himself – of a grey-winged blackbird – if the colours are anything to go by.

Kazuyo remembers when Miwa’s grew in – how she’d been delighted with the colour and the shape, and how he’d been the one to fill out her plumage certificate. Her parents had been too busy. Kazuyo thinks it will be much the same for their son, but unlike their daughter, who had chattered eagerly about her feathers before and after her tenth birthday, Tobio just quietly… fidgets.

“I don’t want them to be big,” is the only thing he really says, when Kazuyo gently prompts him.

For to play volleyball, one’s wings are bound in harnesses, both for protection and to avoid using them. Large wings were cumbersome to bind, and Kazuyo just ruffles his grandson’s hair with a sad, fond smile. Always thinking of a future filled with volleyball.

The end of December rolls in with little fanfare, and, as expected, Kazuyo’s daughter and son-in-law announce a business trip, with the promise to be back for New Year.

 _‘But it’s Tobio’s plumage day,’_ Kazuyo thinks, but does not say, as he promises to of course watch the house and the children, even if Miwa is rapidly becoming a young woman.

“We’ll have a party, just the three of us,” Miwa promises her baby brother on the day their parents leave, smiling extra wide and tight at the corners.

Tobio, to his credit, doesn’t seem to be particularly upset his parents won’t be there, or that he has no friends from school to invite in their place. He just turns wide, hopeful eyes up at his sister. “Can we play volleyball?” He asks her, of course, and Kazuyo smothers the sadness in his smile behind his palm.

Miwa falters, just a little, before she pats her brother’s head, just a shade too roughly. “Just for a little bit!” She says, voice high, “you won’t be able to play much anyway with all those feathers shedding!”

Predictably, Tobio’s round, chubby face crumples into a pouting frown, and Kazuyo laughs, deep and warm. “It’s a coming of age day, Tobio,” he reassures, pulling his grandson into a hug against his side. “There are plenty of days to play after, and besides-“ he reaches out and plucks a loose, fluffy feather out from Tobio’s wing. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to lose all this down.”

Tobio hums and says nothing, watching the feather drift to the floor with faraway blue eyes.

December 22nd dawns with a moult.

“It itches,” Tobio whines as he feebly flaps his wings and sends baby feathers spraying everywhere.

Miwa tuts and sweeps at them ineffectively with her broom, small clumps of down floating in the air.

“It won’t for long,” Kazuyo reassures, as he brushes his wings and encourages the fledgling down to shed.

As the hours slip by, the sooty-black and grey fall away, the fluff replaced with sleek. Tobio’s plumage grows in as something of a surprise – and yet, not so surprising at all.

His wings are not black and grey, not of Kazuyo’s grey-winged blackbird, or his parents’ woodland pigeon, or Miwa’s turtle dove. At first glance, they appear black and white, the colour contrast striking, and hopelessly beautiful.

“Spread them for me?” Kazuyo requests, softly, as Tobio eyes his new, adult wings curiously.

His grandson does so, awkwardly, as he gets used to their new heaviness and size, and the new feathers rustle gently as they’re spread into full wingspan.

And _oh,_ the black isn’t black at all - it’s _blue_. Iridescent and shining when the light catches just right, a perfect match for Tobio’s eyes.

Sometimes, an appointment needed to be made for children whose wings grew in and the species was vague. To measure wing size and feather shape and match it to the bird who flew with the same. But Kazuyo does not need to make one, for he’s seen these wings before, in song and rhyme.

_Magpie._

_two for joy_

“Tobio, you shouldn’t hold your wings like that, you’ll get a sprain.” Kazuyo admonishes gently, as his grandson hunches in the plastic chair beside his hospital bed.

Tobio scowls a little and releases his wings from where he had been tightly pressing them against his back, oh so slightly. The feathers rustle, and one of them, long and shining blue, floats neatly onto the starchy white sheets. Kazuyo reaches out and plucks it up, twiddling it idly between his arthritic fingers, marvelling at the colour.

He watches, out of the corner of his eye, as Tobio follows the feather’s movement and his face crumples even further.

“Do you not like your wings, Tobio?” Kazuyo asks softly, letting the feather drift back down onto the bedsheets.

Tobio jerks and meets his knowing gaze with round eyes.

Always so easy to read.

His grandson says nothing first, his mouth twisting into a pout as his eyes dart away. The wings on his back shift slightly in his agitation, the feathers reflecting sea-green in the terrible hospital lighting.

“I don’t like being a magpie,” Tobio mumbles, the words almost muffled with how tightly his mouth is pursed. “Everyone thinks I’m going to steal stuff, and-“ he breaks off, and one wing almost flaps in a burst of sheer annoyance.

“Ahh,” Kazuyo says, as understanding dawns. Tobio’s sitting too far away and he’s feeling too weak to sit up and reach out with a hand, so he extends one of his own wings. Grey flight feathers brush against sea-blue-green, and Tobio shudders slightly at the contact, though he does not look up.

“Most children look up the birds on our backs and try to draw connections,” he tells his grandson, and something in his tone makes the boy look back up at him. “Sometimes adults as well. But there are no true defining links, Tobio. Your wings are _your_ wings, not the bird who shares them.”

“I’d rather be a pigeon,” Tobio sulks, and Kazuyo laughs for what feels like the first time in days. His chest aches.

“A street bird?” He teases, his voice wheezing over the lost air in his chest. He settles deeper into his pillows, exhaustion pulling at him.

Tobio doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and Kazuyo almost lets his eyes droop shut before his plaintive voice whispers: “Pigeons don’t come with rhymes.”

Ahh.

“Many birds come with songs,” Kazuyo tells him quietly, slowly. “Including blackbirds, and turtle doves.”

Tobio’s head tilts in his intrigue, and some of that frown melts away, until he’s more the boy he normally is – one who looks at him with curious blue eyes, as Kazuyo imparts to him all the secrets of volleyball.

He wishes he had more energy, that he wasn’t ill in a hospital bed. That he could show Tobio books and pictures of birds and wings in song and rhyme. That Tobio is more than just magpie. That he shouldn’t try to hunch his wings in a feeble attempt to hide them, no matter what words are lilted at him.

Lonesome magpies bring nothing but sadness, so the old rhyme goes, but for every person who sees Tobio’s wings and thinks sorrow, there’ll be someone who sees something more.

“One day, Tobio, somebody will look at your wings and not see magpie at all. They’ll just see them for what they are – beautiful.”

Tobio shuffles in his seat, and the light bounces off his feathers, iridescent and lovely.

Kazuyo sighs and gives in; lets his eyes slide closed.

“I should know. Your grandmother had magpie wings too.”

He feels a smaller hand slide across the bed sheets and into his own, and he curls wizened fingers around it gently.

_three for a girl_

Miwa stays for a while in the days following the funeral.

“How’s school?” She asks one day, over breakfast.

“Fine,” Tobio mumbles around his rice.

“… How’s volleyball?”

“… Fine.”

Because it is, he supposes.

He still loves it, still breathes it with every fibre of his being, but some of the magic left the day Kazuyo-san did.

He walks into practice every day and is surrounded by teammates who love it too but don’t _love_ it. Who don’t want to practice more than needed and don’t understand why he does. Who look at him and his jump serve and sets and how derision so quickly replaces the awe.

 _‘Well, he’s a magpie,’_ one of them said once at the beginning of middle school. _‘Don’t you know magpies are geniuses?’_

It sticks like glue.

The first time it’s said around Oikawa’s presence, his upperclassman looks at him with such a complicated expression that not even Iwazumi seems to know how to react to it. Practice was a sombre one that day, and for the first time, it’s Oikawa that leaves the gym before he does.

But now Oikawa isn’t here, and he’s in his final year himself. But there’s none of the admiration, the easy following and the understanding, from his teammates that Oikawa had. Commanded.

He sees a gap, he sets, the spikers miss. Over and over and over.

But his sets are spot-on, he knows, _he knows._ If they would just keep up, then-

Fingers settle in his feathers, and Tobio snaps back to the table with his breakfast cold and half eaten.

“You have such beautiful wings, Tobio,” Miwa sighs as she runs her hands through his feathers, pulling out the loose ones and the strays. “You really should take better care of them.”

Tobio looks over his shoulder the best he can without dislodging Miwa’s hands. He looks at her turtle dove wings, neat and orderly. At the browns and the greys and the soft roundness of her feathers. Understated and pretty. And not for the first time, he wishes his wings were similar – of a quiet, woodland bird, unrecognisable and without a story.

“I mean… look,” Miwa sighs, soft and wistful, and she reaches around Tobio to show him a feather she’d preened out. It’s rumpled and crooked, one of his secondary flight feathers. Black until she twists it, shining deep blue. “I’d love to have wings like these. Why do you hunch them so?”

 _'You can have them',_ Tobio thinks bitterly as he shoves the rest of breakfast around his plate. _Take them away with their sorrow and their genius._

His sister’s fingers leave his wings eventually, the feathers smoothed out, and he immediately tightens them close to his back instinctively.

Don’t draw attention to them.

_four for a boy_

Towards the end of middle school, Tobio meets a boy.

He’s short and loud and bright and absolutely useless at volleyball.

He’s wearing his brace when they meet in the gymnasium’s hallway, so Tobio cannot see what wings are on his back. Not that matters, of course. Wings are wings. And not important for volleyball.

And yet, despite how he is bound, the boy _flies._

He flies higher than anyone else on his team, easily, and yet also higher than anyone on Tobio’s. It doesn’t seem to matter that he cannot be much more than 5’3”, for gravity seems to have given up trying to pull him back down to the ground.

The game ends in thirty minutes, and Tobio spends the thirty seconds after the final whistle feeling absolutely enraged. That someone so talented and passionate could lack such skill. That fate had decided that someone who could keep up with him maybe, actually, did exist, and put them out of reach.

He yells at the boy and at his teammates and throws his brace off in the changing rooms.

_One for sorrow, one for sorrow…_

It’s whispered and sighed around him as the team mooches out of the gymnasium to their bus. Tobio hunches his shoulders and his terrible, unlucky wings, and thinks of nothing except the boy.

(Who, a few minutes later, hurtles after them to scream a declaration down the steps in a fit of tears and pride. Tobio stares up at the boy, who has his wings still bound, and feels something like hope tickle at his chest.)

The boy’s name ends up being Hinata Shouyou.

He arrives back in Tobio’s life in a blaze of sunlight and shouting in the middle of Karasuno’s gym. And maybe fate truly is fickle, to decide to shoo back in the one person who made Tobio feel something other than sorrow, only this time on the same side.

He’s still short and loud and useless at volleyball.

And he’s still wearing a brace – fully prepared for a practice session that both of them never get to partake in – and Tobio doesn’t know why this irks him too. He’s never cared for what wings someone else carries on their back before.

But Hinata is curious, and Tobio finds himself wondering. They'll be small and stumpy, probably, like the boy himself. Bright and loud like a parrot maybe, to match Hinata’s vivid hair and volume.

They’re thrown from the gym and told to get along, and a senpai whispers thinly veiled instructions from the windows.

At first light, they both hurtle down the school pathways to the gym, and it’s then that Tobio finally sees them.

He does a double take.

Hinata’s wings aren’t too large for his body or tiny like the rest of him. They’re decidedly middle sized, and not very loud at all. In fact, there are no colours. From root to wingtip, every single feather is a deep, inky black. Hinata straightens from where he was bent over panting, and his wings unfurl slightly to let some heat escape.

Tobio watches as the feathers shift, and how it’s like no light reflects off them at all. The other boy radiates light from everywhere else, from his voices and his eyes and his stupid hair. But not his wings.

“You’re a _crow_ ,” Tobio blurts.

He doesn’t actually know this. There are more birds than just crows with black wings, but this is _Karasuno_ and surely it can’t be a coincidence.

Hinata jolts on the spot and shoots him a pouting glare. He doesn’t snap his wings close to his back, but he does hunch them, eyeing Tobio moodily. “So?” He confirms, in a sulky grumble.

Tobio dithers on the spot as it occurs to him, slightly delayed, that he does the same thing when people point out he’s a magpie. He doesn’t know anything about crows, except that he sees real ones, sometimes, but maybe they’re bad luck too.

“Did you come to Karasuno because you’re a crow?” He asks, which is the only thing he’s actually interested in knowing.

Hinata blinks at him, seemingly surprised, and he bounces out of his protective hunch. His wings flutter behind him, a dark ripple in the early morning sunlight. “No,” he says, unexpectedly. “I just happened to match.”

There’s a story there, Tobio thinks, and he tilts his head in thought and squints at the boy made of sunlight with wings made of the night sky. But then Tanaka is shuffling towards them, and the thought is dashed.

_five for silver_

Time passes.

Tobio learns that Hinata being at Karasuno with a pair of crow’s wings truly is a coincidence. That he followed his idol to his alma mater in a fit of inspiration and apparent spontaneity.

(“Does he have crow wings too?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

“Isn’t he your hero?”

“He was wearing a brace during all the games, Bakageyama!”)

They lose the Interhigh preliminaries. The vision of Oikawa’s retreating back - his wing brace, bearing the number one, hiding the falcon wings beneath – is burned into his memory. So they train. And practice.

Most of the time. But not right now, as he sits on the grass next to Hinata and sucks in air in a Daichi-mandated break.

Hinata sucks at his water bottle beside him and unclips his brace to flap his wings vaguely. He does this more often than everyone else does, and Tobio supposes it’s because his wings are so dark. They probably trap more heat in than the other, lighter wings that don't try and suck the sun from the sky. The thought makes his own back feel sticky, and he too, releases his brace and allows his own wings to unfurl.

He feels the eyes on him before he spots them, and he shifts uncomfortably. “What?” He grits out, darting a glare at his partner, who’s eyeing his wings curiously.

“What are you anyway?” Hinata chirps, capping his water bottle and tilting backwards so he can see Tobio’s wings better.

The question catches him so off guard, Tobio jumps and accidentally lets his wings extend into full wingspan, and Hinata ducks with a yelp.

“Sorry,” Tobio grunts, and folds them again, the iridescent feathers glittering in the sun. He doesn’t answer Hinata’s question at first, instead fiddling with his water bottle. “What do you mean ‘what am I?’” He grumbles, pouting down at the grass.

“What bird are you?” Hinata repeats, sounding slightly exasperated.

Tobio gapes at him. Hinata frowns back.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Tobio splutters, and his wings shudder on his back in indignation.

“I’m not a bird expert!” Hinata protests, huffing and puffing out his cheeks in annoyance. “I mean they’re really pretty, but I’ve never seen-“ then he cuts himself off, shoving his water bottle back into his mouth as his face catches fire.

Tobio drops his own bottle to the grass, where it starts to roll away.

_“One day, Tobio, somebody will look at your wings and not see magpie at all.”_

“Kageyama?”

Tobio starts and blinks back to reality, where Hinata is gazing at him curiously. His cheeks are still faintly pink, but the anger has left his face, replaced with an almost gentle concern instead.

“Umm,” Tobio mumbles, grabbing at his runaway water bottle so he has something else to look at. “Magpie.”

“Magpie…” Hinata hums, rolling the word around in his mouth. “Oh! Like the rhyme!”

“Yeah,” Tobio grunts. Bites on his water bottle cap and tastes soil.

Silence settles between them for a long, painful moment. Tobio wants to stand up and stalk off and sink into the ground in equal measure. He hears it less now – the rhyme, the comparison to the genius bird and his own skills. But it’s still there, in the shadows of his ‘king of the court’ reputation and in the faces of old teammates.

“I get it,” Hinata says into the quiet, his voice oddly subdued for once. “The beginning part, right?”

Tobio hums around his bottle and says nothing. The way Hinata says it, it almost feels childish to feel upset about it, but his stomach still twists unpleasantly regardless.

“Why don’t we just count up to your jersey number instead?”

“What?” Tobio blinks, blindsided once again.

“Nine!” Hinata elaborates, unnecessarily. “You’re number nine, so it can be nine magpies. Doesn’t it get happier the higher you count anyway?”

“It only goes up to seven…” Tobio says slowly, looking at Hinata like he’s lost his mind.

“No it doesn’t,” Hinata argues, of course, and he holds up his hands, curling up his fingers as he counts down. “One for sorrow...”

Tobio’s stomach flips against his will.

“Two for joy, three for a girl, four a for boy, five for go-, no, five for _silver_ , _six_ for gold, seven-“

“For a secret never to be told, yes,” Tobio cuts him off to finish in a rush.

But Hinata raises his voice and continues to speak. “Eight for a hug, nine for k-kiss…” he stumbles over the words and his cheeks darken again before he clears his throat. “Ten for a bird you must not miss. There! See, it goes to ten. You can be a kissing magpie.”

It’s not super convincing, with how Hinata’s face resembles a tomato (and clashes wildly with his hair), and Tobio isn’t sure he really wants to be a _kissing magpie_ , but it is, he supposes, a little better than everything else he’s been named.

Daichi calls for them then, and Hinata scrambles to his feet before Tobio can say anything more, his face still luminous. Tobio watches him scurry away, how the light misses his wings entirely and sets his hair aglow instead and considers. With pure back wings, Hinata was probably picked on too – he’s never said anything, but Tobio sees the way he hunches his wings sometimes when they’re brought up. It’s familiar and all-too-relatable and Tobio feels the knot in his heart loosen slightly.

If Hinata can find joy in being a crow, from a school where the bird is its emblem, then maybe there is some happiness to found in being a magpie.

_six for gold_

“Kageyama, can you fly?” Hinata had asked him once.

“Nope. You?”

“Nah, not anymore.”

It’s not uncommon, being unable to fly properly. Most children can, once their adult plumage grows in. But as they grow older, and heavier, there are many wings that are simply too small to allow sustained flight. And even the larger wings needed continuous training to be strong enough to carry a fully grown adult. For the most part, people settled for being able to hover and glide short distances, far from the endless swooping and diving of their true avian counterparts.

“Fell out of a tree when I was younger,” Hinata had shrugged when Tobio had raised an eyebrow. “Landed on my wing wrong and busted a… tendon? I think? Anyway, the doctor said I could probably fly if I trained really hard, but… seemed like a waste of time to me. I could be playing volleyball instead, you know? Flying without wings is cooler anyway.”

Tobio had stored this little titbit away and hummed his agreement. Learning to fly _did_ detract from volleyball, and there was something oddly… magnificent, about watching Hinata defy the laws of physics with metaphorical wings, rather than the ones that sprouted from his back.

This conversation comes back to him, all at once, as he watches Hinata leap for the ball as if in slow motion. It’s his set, of course, because anything hard and fast like that is always meant for Hinata, the only one who can match them. But then someone else is jumping – a first year – a new kouhai who’s desperate to prove himself, and the trajectory is just all wrong.

They collide in mid-air and tumble to the ground. The first year falls onto his side with a grunt, but rolls to his knees quickly enough. Hinata, however, lands heavily on his back, and his short, sharp shout of pain echoes around the gym like a gunshot.

When he doesn’t get up right away, it’s Tobio who reaches him first, despite being the furthest away on their side of the net.

“What hurts?” He demands, trying to ignore the pounding of his heart as he helps Hinata into a sitting position. Beside them, the first year frets noisily, babbling out apologies until Yachi scurries over to take him aside to calm him down.

Hinata doesn’t reply immediately, even when Ukai bullies his way through the growing crowd to crouch by his other side. He shifts on the spot and rolls his head, as though testing what did and didn’t hurt. Then he shrugs his shoulders and hisses air sharply between his teeth.

“Wing,” he grunts, and Tobio unclasps his brace immediately.

Hinata’s left wing extends out fully and naturally, but his right hangs oddly, and can only be stretched so far before Hinata squirms and whines. Ukai runs his hands over the joint that won’t extend fully with a frown and Tobio tries to force his heart from his throat back into his ribcage.

Wing injuries aren’t normally catastrophic for volleyball – they’re braced out of the way, and unneeded for the sport. It’s normally only a true problem if something is broken, so if it’s just a sprain…

“Is that the one with your bad tendon?” Tobio asks Hinata quietly as the other boy tries to move his wing feebly on Ukai’s murmured instruction.

“Mmhm,” Hinata grunts, then gasps aloud when he tries to fold it back up to join his left. He opts to leave it hanging, ebony feathers brushing against the hardwood floor.

“It doesn’t extend properly anyway?” Ukai asks, and then looks relieved when Hinata shakes his head. “Okay, then it’s probably just a sprain. Ice it for a couple days and _rest,_ ” he punctuates this with a stern look, “and it should heal up fine.”

“Go and see the nurse, Hinata-kun,” Takeda-sensei interrupts before Hinata can truly start whining his protest, “she can give you something for the pain.”

“It’s just a couple of days,” Tobio points out as he accompanies Hinata from the nurse’s office, his wing now in some kind of complicated sling to support it, as they walk towards the bike rack. “And there’s not a tournament for weeks.”

Hinata glares at him, eyes made of fire and gold and Tobio stares back, impassively.

“Sports injuries are just something you have to get used to,” he says diplomatically. “At least this one wasn’t _actually_ your fault.”

Hinata sulks and huffs and clambers onto his bike with a storm cloud hanging over his head, but he allows Tobio to check his sling is secure nonetheless. Hinata will always be the sort of person to scowl and pout when he’s unable to play volleyball for any reason, Tobio thinks, but at least he’s better at managing himself now.

The next day, Tobio skips extra practice after normal practice, and bikes his way across the mountain pass instead.

He turns up at Hinata’s door at an hour that’s probably too late to be socially acceptable, with nothing but a bag of cold meat buns in his hand, but Hinata lets him in with a beaming smile all the same.

He’s removed his sling, and Tobio had tutted at this, but Hinata was, to his credit, holding his wing normally by himself now, so he refrains from fussing too much. Hinata ushers them into his room after a brief shout at this mother that the late evening guest is for him, but it’s Natsu who hollers her greeting at their retreating backs down the hall.

“She’s still got her baby feathers,” Tobio observes as Hinata plonks down on his bed and inhales a meat bun.

“Yeah, but it's her birthday’s soon. It’ll be weird seeing her not… fluffy,” Hinata replies around a mouthful of dough.

“What do you think she’ll get?”

“Probably a sparrow - the same as Mum,” Hinata says, licking grease off his fingers. “She’s got the same brown baby feathers. We haven’t told her yet though, she keeps saying she wants the same as me, but my baby feathers were really dark grey.”

“My sister wants my wings too,” Tobio laments, and Hinata hums curiously as he sets up a gaming console.

“She’s not a magpie?”

“Dove. My parents are pigeons.”

Hinata’s laugh is loud and boisterous, and Tobio finds his mouth tilting up just slightly at the corner.

“Wow, you really won the genetics lottery, huh?”

Tobio feels his smile melt away into a frown, and Hinata shoves a controller into his hands.

“Oh come on, like we all don’t want pretty wings with shiny feathers that match our eyes perfectly. Press start, doofus.”

Tobio presses ‘start’ and flops onto the bed beside Hinata, trying not to jostle his bad wing, and tries his best not to think about how long Hinata must have looked at his wings to discern how closely they matched his eyes.

_seven for a secret, never to be told_

“Here, if you can fit it in with all that sunscreen you’re taking.”

Hinata looks at the bottle Tobio is holding out, and tilts his head. “What is it?”

“Wax for your wings,” Tobio says, and Hinata’s brow furrows.

The airport is noisy, and terribly busy, and shouldn’t be the place to be having a heart to heart, but it’s what everyone does anyway. They stand there as Yamauchi and Yachi try to balance Hinata’s suitcase on the check-in scale and Tsukishima tilts his head so nobody can see the mist in his eyes as the light reflects off his glasses just so.

Hinata drops his carry-on bag to take the bottle, twisting it this way and that. “Okay?” He says, sounding extremely confused.

“It reflects the sun to keep the heat off,” Tobio sighs, simultaneously annoyed and deeply embarrassed that he has to explain. “Your wings are sun suckers as it is, you’re going to get heatstroke every day if you’re not careful.”

“Oh!” Hinata chirps, as the pieces align, and he looks at the instructions on the side of the bottle a little exuberantly now, eyes shining happily. “Two presents! I always knew you loved me, Yamayama, I never doubted you.”

Tobio mashes his hands against his best friend’s face and growls and relishes in the squawking it elicits so he has something to focus on other than his heart tearing itself to pieces in his chest. Hinata thwacks him with a wing to get him to stop, so Tobio thumps him back with one of his own in return and then suddenly it’s feathers all around.

“You are in _public,”_ Tsukishima drawls loudly from behind them.

Hinata goes to retort, but then an announcement comes over the speakers in relation to his flight and then it’s a bit of rushed chaos to finish checking in.

“Have fun Hinata!”

“Stay safe! We’ll video chat every week, okay?”

“Try not to embarrass yourself.”

“Don’t get sunstroke,” Tobio opts for, and Hinata shoots him a wry grin, before he’s dragging them all into a group hug. It’s messy and unco-ordinated, and Tobio almost wants to bury his face in Tsukishima’s nearby barn owl’s wing to hide how his eyes start to shine.

Hinata’s flight number is called again and they break apart in a mixture of sniffles and smiles. He squeezes them all one by one (even Tsukki, who just pats him awkwardly on the head), with Tobio being the last.

“When I come back, I’ll kick your ass,” he promises in his ear, and Tobio fights the urge to press his nose into his hair.

Then he’s turning and hurrying for his gate, the airport lights bouncing off his hair and not his wings, as dark and striking as they had been the day Tobio first saw them.

A pair of slender arms wrap around one of his, and Yachi leans her head against his shoulder. “Did you tell him?” She asks, her voice pitched quiet so only he can hear.

“No,” he admits, because he was cowardly, as the pair of crow’s wings disappear into the airport terminal.

Yachi says nothing, just stretches one small yellow canary wing around his back, and Tobio sighs, and wraps a magpie wing around her in turn.

_eight for a hug_

But Hinata keeps his promise, and, two years and a handful of months later, he does indeed, kick Tobio’s ass.

He’s never smiled so hard at the final whistle of a game that he’s just lost.

Then there’s handshakes and cooldown stretches and autographs (Romero asks for one from Hinata, who almost faints) and a heart stopping moment where Hibarida steps into the ring to whisper into Hinata’s ear, and then they are – temporarily – free.

Hinata slips his small hand into his and tugs and then they’re both scurrying off into the Sendai City Gymnasium’s corridors. Nobody stops them.

They round corners until there’s no-one there, and then Hinata pulling off his wing brace with one hand and unclasping Tobio’s with the other. Tobio lets him, bemused, and watches as the leather clatters to the floor. And then Hinata is all but throwing himself into his arms, burying his face into his clavicle and makes a hiccuping noise against his skin that could be anything between a laugh and a sob.

Tobio curls his arms around him and pulls him close, feels his heart sing in his chest for the first time in over two years. There’s a rustle and soft swoosh, as Hinata’s wings unfurl fully from his back and encircle them too. Tobio’s own twitch and hover at his back, before he too, lets them spread. The deep, inky black of Hinata’s flight feathers stands out in contrast to his stark white ones, as their wings brush in a facsimile of a hug.

It’s rather an intimate thing to do, to brush wings like this as if in embrace, and Tobio feels a heady heat swoop through him.

Hinata turns his face so his cheek is resting on Tobio’s collarbone, the fabric slightly damp beneath his skin. “I missed you,” he sighs, and Tobio scrunches his eyes shut before emotion renders him incapable of all speech.

“I guess I missed you too,” he croaks, and Hinata squeezes him a little harder in retaliation as he coughs out a wet laugh.

_nine for a kiss_

They’re at Tobio’s apartment, the day their new national team jerseys arrive.

It’s not the first time for Tobio, but it is for Hinata, and the other man had almost burst into flight several times from sheer excitement until the box arrives at the door. Tobio sighs at the mess of black feathers on his carpet and shoos Hinata into the living room with the box under his arm.

It had been a no-brainer, really, as they pull the scarlet jerseys from their plastic packaging and unfurl them to Hinata’s enthralled coos, to pick the numbers that are emblazoned on them.

Tobio shucks his shirt immediately and yanks his jersey on, the stretchy fabric sitting cool against his skin. He peeks up as he smooths the creases out, and cannot prevent the smile that wobbles its way against his face at the sight of Hinata across from him – decked out in red with a shining white number ten just below his sternum.

Hinata turns on the spot, his smile brighter than all the suns in the universe, as he takes in the jersey he has worked so hard for. And maybe the red of it does clash with his hair slightly, but it compliments the ink of his wings perfectly. Tobio feels his mouth dry up and he swallows roughly, as he watches those feathers shift against the red, and remembers all at once those same wings disappearing into a crowd in a busy airport, and a confession fading along with them.

“Kageyama?” Hinata pipes up then, and Tobio blinks into focus, to find his best friend urging him to stand up.

He does so, and Hinata makes a twirling motion with his finger, so Tobio rotates, feeling a little silly. Until Hinata reaches out and stops him once his back is facing the other man. Tobio pauses and frowns, confused, wondering why Hinata wants to look at his back. Because of the wing braces, the backs of official jerseys are usually blank. No point adding sponsors to fabric nobody can see, after all.

But small hands don’t settle on the fabric against his skin, but in his feathers, and Tobio tries and fails to suppress the full body shiver that shudders through him. Hinata’s fingers stroke through his feathers, preening and tidying and the whole thing is so intimate that Tobio feels his heart crack. His wings haven’t been touched like this since he was a child.

“You know,” Hinata whispers, “all the time I was in Brazil, I never saw a pair of wings as beautiful as yours.”

Tobio curls his hands into fists as his heart bleeds into his chest.

“Do you still hate them?”

The question is sudden as it surprising, and Tobio turns just enough that he can look over his shoulder into pudding warm brown eyes. “What?”

“You hated them for so long,” Hinata says sadly. “I never really understood why.”

 _Because they were a magpie’s wings_ , is what Tobio thinks, immediately.

Because magpies were bad luck when they were lonely. Because they stole things. Because they were geniuses and Tobio is no genius.

But Hinata never saw them as _magpie wings_ , he realises. He’d spent several months not even knowing that they _were_ magpie wings. He looked at them and just thought them pretty, voiced his jealousy because he thought his own were too dark and too scary. Hinata didn’t join Karasuno because he had a crow’s wings on his back, because Hinata doesn’t look at wings and see the bird. He looks at wings and sees their colours, of the person they’re attached to and how it matches their eyes, all of things.

“I don’t,” Tobio croaks at last, and Hinata peers up at him curiously. “Hate them.”

_Not anymore._

Hinata is quiet, and then he’s tugging at Tobio until he’s facing him again, running his fingertips over the bright number nine on his shirt.

“Nine for-“ Tobio starts, then breaks off, as humiliation and cowardice strangles his throat.

But Hinata just smiles, understanding. “Nine for a kiss,” he finishes, and his eyes are so warm. “I thought you hated that rhyme.”

“It gets happier,” Tobio murmurs, “the higher you count.”

Hinata huffs a laugh, before he’s rocking upwards, a blur of orange and red and the deepest black, until his lips slot neatly against Tobio’s in the most tentative of kisses.

Time stops for all of a second, until every nerve in Tobio’s body ignites and then he’s cupping Hinata’s jaw with both hands as best he can and drawing him close, _closer_ , kissing him deep with a desperation that been filling him since he was a teenager.

“For the record,” he gasps, when they break apart seemingly a lifetime later, “your wings are beautiful too.”

Hinata smiles against him, bright and blinding and in complete opposite to his light eating wings, which spread wide in their joy, dark and striking and _perfect._

_ten for a bird you must not miss_

Tobio sets.

Watches the ball arc through the air too fast for just _anyone_ to match. Watches as Hinata rockets into the sky with invisible wings, gravity a mere plaything in his pocket, and spike the ball home. Watches as the opposing team on the biggest stage in the world gawps, and smirks victoriously.

Hinata lands, the number ten on his wing brace gleaming under the stadium lights, and turns to smack his palms against Tobio’s as the final whistle blows.

Tobio pulls him close to knock their foreheads together, feels a matching grin split across his face as his partner beams at him, feels his wings itch beneath his brace.

When he was a child, with sneers at his back and so, _so_ lonely, he couldn’t quite believe his grandfather’s words. That somebody would come along and find him. Challenge him, play volleyball for as long as he wanted and then for even longer.

Would see the wings on his back and not see anything else but beauty.

Hinata darts up and kisses him, wicked quick, a brief lightning bolt of affection before the cameras can catch him, and then dances away to celebrate with their team.

Tobio cannot fly. Even with the wings on his back, he cannot fly. But he doesn’t want, nor need to. There’s a different set of wings he gives flight to, one he’s nearly missed so many times over, but one that is now _his,_ as the last remnants of sorrow wither and fade, and the magpie follows the crow.

**Author's Note:**

> the specific birds, should anyone want to look them up:
> 
> kageyama: eurasian magpie  
> hinata: carrion crow  
> kazuyo: grey-winged blackbird  
> miwa: turtle dove  
> oikawa: peregrine falcon  
> tsukki: barn owl  
> yachi: yellow canary


End file.
